Editorial: Find lasting solutions for homelessness

Tent City, a makeshift homeless housing community, is under a bridge in Greenville.

Homeless people in Greenville County got a name and face in the November series in The Greenville News written by Lyn Riddle and captured in photographs by Mykal McEldowney. As a result, homeless people are no longer a mystery for many people who live tucked away in the suburbs, gated communities or pleasant rural areas.

Over the holidays many good-hearted people opened their wallets and their checkbooks to help homeless people - particularly in what is called Tent City. That is the collection of tents hidden in a part of the county that most people didn't know existed. It is a makeshift campsite that sits off Buncombe Road under the bridge where the Pete Hollis Highway crosses eight tracks of the Norfolk Southern Railroad.

A conversation has been started in Greenville because of this compelling newspaper series. People are aware of a problem that now haunts them. They want to help.

Emergency assistance is needed, and surely has been greatly appreciated. People who do not have a place to live need food and temporary shelter, and especially during brutal winter weather such as what has visited the Upstate in recent weeks.

Lasting solutions will require systemic change, open discussion about the reasons behind homelessness, and a community-wide effort that involves service providers, the faith community and funding organizations. Greenville is up to this challenge, and the opportunity to address it has been created by The Greenville News series.

Homeless people are as different as the colleagues in your office or the people who fill your sanctuary on a Sunday morning. The newspaper's series focused primarily on what service providers call the "chronically homeless." These are the people who have been on the streets for a long time, and they have other difficulties in their life, such as mental illness or drug addiction, that make the transition to permanent housing more of a challenge.

Other people or groups who find themselves homeless need help, too. This may include the single mother who has several children, a low-paying job and no financial support from the father or fathers of her children. It may be the family where the breadwinner is in the grip of long-term unemployment. Or it could be the older worker with health problems who suddenly is unemployed in a tough economy that isn't kind to people without modern skills.

These groups also need help out of their harsh circumstances, but most often these situations are easier to address. More transitional housing is a start for people in this group. Better public transportation is needed, as is health care, job training and better-paying jobs.

People who fall into the category of chronic homelessness need more opportunities to move out of their brutal circumstances and start down the hard path of finding a new way of life. What they don't need, according to reputable service providers who are in the trenches every day, are changes that make them more comfortable in their homelessness. Temporary emergency assistance, of course, is essential, because it will be impossible to help a drug addict move beyond addiction if he starves or freezes to death.

Emergency assistance that moves beyond temporary help, however, now has a new name - "toxic charity." That is well-meaning help that ends up hurting the people in need rather than helping them become independent and move beyond their problems no matter how real those problems are. Many churches and service organizations in Greenville now are studying how to provide meaningful assistance aimed at lasting solutions.

"Homelessness is a community issue," as Mike Chesser, executive director of United Housing Connections (formerly Upstate Homeless Coalition), recently told the newspaper. As mentioned in his op-ed last month, Chesser wants the community to have a symposium later this fall to explore solutions to homelessness and start working on a plan that involves service providers, the faith community, foundations, lawmakers and, as he put it, "all people of good will."

Possible solutions include not only finding new sources of funding for more transitional houses, mental health services and treatment programs for addiction, but also reconsidering how existing funding sources are used so they do the most good for the most people.

Other organizations in Greenville that have spent years working with the homeless also see a unique opportunity to look for more lasting solutions to a problem where solutions often seem elusive. A consensus that is forming is that the solution is not to make a better Tent City, because that likely would provide less incentive for people living there to try to move beyond chronic homelessness. The solution is to start looking for ways to help all the homeless move beyond their current circumstances regardless of whether they are a single mom sleeping in a car with her three children, or a drug addict who is living on the street.

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Editorial: Find lasting solutions for homelessness

Homeless people in Greenville County got a name and face in the November series in The Greenville News written by Lyn Riddle and captured in photographs by Mykal McEldowney.